In the early hours of the tenth of July, under the quiet cover of darkness, a lorry eased through the gates of the British Museum carrying what may be the most storied piece of embroidered linen in the world. Yard by careful yard, over eighteen painstaking hours, French and British conservators unfurled the Bayeux Tapestry — all seventy metres of it — from the folding stand in which it had made its crossing from Normandy. It was, by any measure, a homecoming nine centuries in the making, for the work had not been seen on English soil for roughly a thousand years. The tapestry, which is embroidered in coloured wool yarn on linen rather than woven as its name might suggest, narrates the turbulent chain of events that culminated in the Norman Conquest of 1066.

For the conservators who have devoted careers to its preservation, the journey from the Bayeux Museum — which faces closure for renovation — to London represented both an enormous risk and a rare opportunity. French Culture Minister Catherine Pégard, who viewed the work in situ at the British Museum alongside the museum's chair, former British Chancellor George Osborne, moved quickly to calm those in France who had feared the travel would prove damaging. "I believe that it will reassure all the sceptics," she said, having examined the embroidery at close quarters. Professor Michael Lewis, the curator who first proposed the loan back in 2013, was equally emphatic: the collaboration between the two national teams had been, in his word, "remarkable," and the tapestry showed no evidence of damage whatsoever.